Heloise was probably the better educated of the two. She was the child of unknown parents. Bayle asserts that she was the daughter of a priest, and his facilities and laboriousness respecting such abstruse particulars no one will question. The authority from which he is possibly quoting, says that this priest was John “Somebody” (_nescio cujus_) and a canon of the same cathedral with Fulbert at Paris. Doubtless the trace of her ancestry is utterly lost to us beyond these meagre items. Even Fulbert’s alleged relationship has been questioned. But the scholarship of Heloise speaks for itself in a terse, sparkling Latin style, which is as pleasant beside Abelard’s lumbering sentences as a bright mountain brook beside a turbid and turbulent stream. Count de Bussy-Rabutin—no mean critic—has put on record that he never read more elegant Latin. She also understood Greek and Hebrew, with neither of which, strange to say, was Abelard acquainted. And at first blush it would seem that the teacher should have been the pupil. Absolute justice requires that the ugly and disgraceful slurs in the _Historia Calamitatum_, and even in the correspondence, should not be overlooked. Here is what will serve for a fair example. He says of her, _Quae cum per faciem non esset infima, per abundantiam litterarum erat suprema_—while she was not exactly the worst-looking of them, she was the best educated; and therefore he selected her! The _spretae injuria formae_ never went further than this. But this is by no means the solitary instance of that low snarl in which the currish nature of the Breton rustic now and then indulged. What, then, could have been the spell by which this charming woman drew Christendom after her? Popes and bishops called her “beloved daughter,” priests entitled her “sister,” and all laymen laid claim to her as “mother.” If she were not so beautiful as some authorities positively state, she must certainly have been marvellously captivating. But chiefest of her many graces was her crowning loyalty and love. It showed itself in perfect sympathy, in entire self-devotion. Michelet, indeed, has observed that the legend of Abelard and Heloise is all that has survived in France out of the story of the Middle Ages. Nor has the unanimity of literary judgment upon these lovers been less remarkable than the interest which they have inspired. With one voice Abelard is condemned and with one voice Heloise is extolled. “She was,” says a brilliant writer, “a great, heroic woman, one of those formed out of the finest clay of humanity.” “With the Grecian fire,” says another, “she had the Roman firmness.” And even the rude picture which the mechanical touch of Alexander Pope has painted, leaves to us in the “Epistle of Heloise” a trace of the same beauty, and affords one line— “And graft my love immortal on thy fame”—